Recitation and listening to nursery rhymes in the familiarization with a literacy language in kindergarteners: Not kids' stuff.

A large linguistic distance exists between spoken Arabic and the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) the literary language (a diglosia). Novice readers, therefore, struggle with the complex orthography of Arabic as well as the mastering of MSA. Here, we tested whether structured activities in MSA would advance kindergarteners' MSA aptitude by the end of the school year. We examined two issues: (a) whether reciting nursery rhymes in MSA would be more effective in promoting language and preliteracy skills in kindergarteners compared to listening to the same texts, and (b) whether there are additional advantages for using texts directly referring to the alphabet. Thus, 136 kindergarteners (